Teslas are pretty popular here in Rhode Island. While that appears virtuous, it’s important to recall that 95% of Rhode Island electricity comes from natural gas, so those Teslas are running on fossil fuel. EVs are proliferating all over the planet: “Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Car News China reports that in the first half […]
Kodak was ubiquitous when I was growing up. While I never owned a Kodak camera, I purchased miles of Kodak film, both color and black-and-white, as well as developing chemicals and printing paper. When Fujichrome first appeared, I tried it, but the pictures always turned out with a green-blue cast. Kodachrome and Ektachrome ruled. The […]
Apparently, the guy who bankrupted casinos has called economics Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman a “deranged bum.” LOL! Trump is pissed at Krugman for criticizing Trump’s tariff policy and firing of the BLS person. “Claiming that economic data you don’t like is fraud perpetrated by a deep state conspiracy has been standard practice on the right […]
It its quest to eliminate diversity in America, the Trump Administration is demanding admissions data from colleges and universities to hunt for evidence of discrimination against white kids and kids from red states. In fact, there’s a history of affirmative action for white kids in admissions that goes back a century: In the early 20th […]
Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer for allegedly manipulating statistics to make him look bad. In support of the firing, he pointed to what he said were exaggerated jobs numbers in the Biden administration that had to be revised downward by—wait for it—BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer! “How could downward revisions released during Biden’s presidency have […]
As my AB peeps know, I loves me some prophecy. As a consumer, not a producer. My wife and I play this little game. If I make a prediction, she grabs a post-it note and writes it down, then dates it and makes me sign it. She saves them and we review them periodically. The […]
The Fed has two jobs: (1) control inflation and (2) maximize employment. So how’s that going? “That’s a change in tone from last week, when most Fed policymakers voted to leave their influential interest rate unchanged for the fifth time this year. Fed officials had been content to wait and see how tariffs were moving […]
The “health” that drives private sector health insurance is the health of the corporate bottom line. As understand it, the “advantage” of Medicare Advantage was supposed to be lower costs for better benefits that only the free market could promise. How’s that working out? “UnitedHealthcare said in its second quarter earnings call that it plans […]
In the past six months, the Trump Administration, acting through Elon Musk’s DOGE, cut more than 10% of the staff at the National Weather Service. But it looks like TACO doesn’t just apply to tariffs: “The National Weather Service has received permission to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians just months after being hit […]
mRNA vaccines proved transformational in the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, they’ve allowed a rapid pivot to attack new variants. They saved tens of millions of lives worldwide, and prevented long COVID in survivors. “Infectious disease experts say the mRNA technology used in vaccines is safe, and they credit its development during the first Trump administration […]